Monday, January 20, 2014

As long as long you are not a service company where weekly you need spend an hour on international phone call discussing the progress in MS Project following tools are good enough to manage small teams.

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Recently, Our www.AdobeKnowHow.com team had been to Goa for team outing with family.It was such great 4 days trip after a hectic release. While on trip we dint worry about splitting the bill, we just recorded all expenses. After returning the bigger problem was how do we split the bills? Some were with family some were not, some dint booze while some did? some dint come for karwar trip. We then found this super start app called SettleUp

It allowed us to manage uneven share ( i.e. some people with family had three head or two head, while bachelors had only one head)

It allowed one particular expenses to be shared among specific set of people, out of 9, 4 dint booze.

Some places where credit card were not accepted, money was collected from all and we paid the bill.

At the end it just reduces the number of transactions that need to be done. If 'A' had to give 'B' 100 bucks and 'B' had to give 'C' 100 bucks. Summary would tell that 'A' need to pay 'C' 100 bucks.

When I read settleUp FB page or blog, they mentioned that Google is trying to patent algorithms that reduces the number of transactions in such group expenses.

Another good feature of this app was, not all group member need to install and sign-up for this. One person can do it for all, and later add group members, without affecting already entered transactions.

I guess it should be very good app for all flatemates/roommates, college students.

Friday, September 20, 2013

Copy.Com is a cloud storage and file sync service like Dropbox/Google Drive/ SkyDrive/Box etc. I have used Dropbox, Google Drive and Box very extensively. I have very rarely seen such an amazing feature rich and maturesoftware as version 1 from any newcomer in market. Its from famous hard drive maker Barracuda. They are giving away 15GB Free space for new sign up.

They have some amazing referral scheme. Referrer and Referred both earn 5 GB free space, hence this post :), and there is no upper-cap like dropbox has 16 GB upper-cap.

Their web interface doesn't require any learning, its ditto as as Mac OS Finder.

After installing their desktop sync client you can simply right-click and get a public link of a folder, which you can share with anyone.

Their Sync client for desktop is super fast,and smart, it chooses to upload small files first before uploading bigger files.

They have local peer discovery. I had sync client installed on three PCs in same network, It copied about 1.5 GB data in less than a minute, that was lightening fast, I was shocked as it was faster than normal network files transfer, don't believe me? you think I am bragging, try it out yourself in high speed LAN.

Sync client has options to limit upload/download rate ( I wish they had option to schedule rate changes)

Sync client has options to choose which files you want to sync ( normally everyone will have this)

You would be able to preview all most all types of files on their web interface.

Like all other cloud storage vendors they also have client for all sort of devices and computers.

Whats missing?

Local peer discovery doesn't work for Windows 8 PC.

Dint get any option to 'create a new folder' while sharing pics from Gallery via Copy. However their android app had an option to create folder, and had an option browse through images on phone and upload.

Bug: On Windows 8 notifications wouldn't come on desktop ( like you get from dropbox or outlook email notification).

Limitation: Web interface had no search option or may be I couldn;t discover it)

Bug: On my desktop 1 (win7), I pasted a 1.5 GB folder into root folder of Copy, It took about 1.5 hours to upload, while this folder was getting uploaded, on 2nd Win8 desktop (that was in the same network) , this 1.5 GB folder newly pasted never appeared. It dint appear event one after it was completely uploaded from my desktop 1, So its seems they have some bug with Win8 client, but when I installed the Copy client on 3rd win7 desktop, It copied everything in about 1 minute as mentioned before.

Final verdict? Its a must to have, its as mature as Dropbox in its first version itself. It gives more free space than dropbox. its very fast. Please signup using https://copy.com?r=Z764BP

Has everything that you would need on a home PC, you can download movies using torrent :) , play audio,video , you can browse, has a app-store kinda of thing called ubuntu software center, which has huge collection of really cool softwares.you constantly keep getting updates as you get on Windows and Mac.

Friday, May 7, 2010

Folder Size, is an add on for Windows Explorer. When we go to Windows Explorer's detail view, the "Size" column show size of files but not the size of folders, and that 's what i was looking for.

I thought of of writing a shell extension myself, but before that I searched if something similar existed and I found this one back in 2006. and since then I have been in using it.

In between I had uninstall it for because it's background service which keeps calculating the size of fodler was consuming my CPU a lot. but the newer version but the latest version 2.5 rocks. it has overcome all those performance issue. Kudos to author.

- Two side file comparision is simple and smarter than other tool ( EXamDiff etc)

it try to find the context of source code and compare

- If there is only few characters changed in one particular line, it doesn't mark entire line by one color, it marked only those changed characters,

which makes it more readable.

- Aligning option rocks , If the tool could not it smartly ,

You can align a chunk of code to other side manually. say this is your content

-------------------------------- Before Manual Align

--------------------------------

Chunk 1 | Chunk 1 Chunk3 | Chunk 2

chunk 2 |

--------------------------------

Right Click on Chunk 2 on right hand side and say "Align" now right click on Chunk 2 on left hand side and say align > now the result will look like this.

-------------------------------- After Manual Align

--------------------------------

Chunk 1 | Chunk 1 Chunk3 |

chunk 2 | Chunk 2

--------------------------------

Folder Comparision:

I just love it's folder comparision.

I wish it was avaiable for Mac also, ireally have hard time in finding the folder diff on Mac any of you know any simple and good folder diff tool on Mac?

- Easy to use - a) in explore right click on any folder and say select for comparision say your folder name was "xyz"

b) now right click on any other folder and say Compare with "XYZ".

- Filters and sesssion : I often compare my source code on one machine with source code on other machine, which belong s to same source code repository. I want to compare only source code file and not the binay files or intermeidates fiels generated by developement tool like Visual Studio generates PDB, IDL, etc ... so can just right click on one of them

say exclude, it will ask me , all files of this type or just this one, I say all files of this type... and ingnores all the files of that type( PDB,IDL,....) and now I can save the session and use the same session again , so that I don't need to excude those files again.

- Auto refresh : If you keep FolderDiff Open on some interval it keep checking if there were any changes.

- Cool color coding : color coding is a plus point from usability side

- Filters : you wan to see - all files

- only differences - only orphens

- orphens only on left side

- orphens only on right side.

Overall I love this utility and planing to buy it's next version Beyond Compare 3 very soon.